Gospel & Universe
Primum Mobile
This page consists of a long poem set in Vicenza in the evening. The poem flirts with the beauty of Dante's universe, but opts for realism instead.
Cherubs & Nitrogen - Beatrice Portinari - Walt Whitman - Our Primum Mobile
Cherubs & Nitrogen
Sitting at a café on Piazza dei Signori
I hear the church bells ring out
through the night-time streets of Vicenza
reminding us of eternity
the world up above
clanging through the self-same air
Above the wayward clouds sits Paradiso
above the adult cherubs perching on the golden margins
and silver linings
playing harps
beyond the atmosphere thick with nitrogen
oxygen, carbon dioxide, hydrogen, helium
and 1% H2O
The bells sound of Upper Space
the Music of the Spheres, the Divine Violinist
plucking the icy harp-strings of Saturn
its gold and violet rings
which are lines
that have been swept so long
that we forget they're circles
of the Divine Geometer
Circles, always perfect circles
like the circular planets circling
in the Greater Circle of the Primum Mobile
moved by the great triple circle of God
The light and love of a circle surround it,
as like the others; of this space
only He who encloses it understands.
(Paradiso. 27. 12-14)
Unable to understand
Dante jumped beyond the stars
beyond time and space
entering the realm of the Deity who created both
from this double world to that realm of triune unity
the Spirit of God Himself
mirrored in perfect circles by the Son and Holy Ghost:
In the deep clear
essence of that lofty light, three circles
appeared to me -- of three colors,
but of the same dimension;
the first was reflected by the second,
like a rainbow by a rainbow, and the third
seemed like fire breathed by the others.
(Paradiso. 33. 115-121)
Beatrice Portinari
All of this poetry lies somewhere beyond Pluto
(who was recently de-ranked, lost even to himself)
far, far beyond our oblate spheroid
and the ellipses of the planets of our solar system
somewhere in outer space
cold and black
with quasars and odd debris
Do prophets, like poets, just make stuff up --
like the animals that went in two by two
like all those circles and capital letters
like the magic goose and holy page?
Or is there something divine, higher, beyond, behind their hopeful cosmologies?
Is there something beyond spectrographs, deeper than dark matter; something out there -- and right here, right in front of my skeptical eyes and ears, my blood, flesh, and bone, as I sit here, surrounded by the chaos of clinking glasses in this Vicenza coffee shop of random experience?
Is there something behind the absurdity of human life that makes a singular me worth being? Is there a correlate to this astronomical miracle of being, somewhere out there, vast as outer space?
Dante knew he could never know it all -- not logically anyway. To him, it was more a divine comedy than a summa cosmologica. The best he could do was build up his metaphors
and let them collapse:
the eternal beauty of a Florentine girl
at a water fountain
and he, Cupid-struck
watching as she walked away
into the streets of Florence
her feet lifting off the ground
light-footed up the conical Mountain
into the clouds
past the startled angels
ascending at last to the Mother of God
deep at the centre of the Blessed Rose
Even this, he admitted, can't get to the essence of this universe
the ether hanging in the night air
of a world that holds within it a girl's perfect beauty
and a mother's perfect love
rare
in the imploding chaos of wars and plague
as a virgin birth
The beauty of it all
the Madonnas with their golden air
the blue Giotto heavens
make me rethink
what I like to call the facts
Walt Whitman
I feel like Walt Whitman
looking out into the mystical moist night air
after viewing the proofs of the learned astronomer
after the figures were ranged in columns before him
the charts and the diagrams
The infinite space he imagined
back in 1865
and his optimistic union
of microcosmic self and sky
-- Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son --
has been multiplied and yet also reduced
since the advent of Hubble's telescope
and the discovery of galaxies in 1923;
since Darwin and the deciphering
of cuneiform, collapsing stories
we once thought revealed
or at least original
now derivative
from Akkad
and the
lost
bards
of Sumer
which for decades
was seen as a reduction
as part of the Modern fall from Grace
but I would argue that this is not the case
but, rather, this is a case of Herbert's "Easter Wings"* in disguise
because if what we always wanted was the truth
(whether we could handle it or not)
we got it
and now above us lie three hundred billion galaxies
because we are now closer to an exact
albeit expanding
calculation of infinity than ever
Above us stretches a sky glistening with stars
ten million million million leagues deep
but this time the depth is literal
and also a metaphor of what might be
a probability of other life
amid the chaos and order of the stars
who knows
perhaps even proof of spirit
sextillions of miles away
that may be the same spirit we have here
thinking, feeling
but for a longer or more predictable time
living for a thousand years
with senses woven into unity with a million worlds
yet the same spirit that we have
here in our precarious world
in which we may not live another day
or another moment -- a stroke of bad luck
a seizure while seizing the day
or we may live another forty years
qui sait?
Our Primum Mobile
There may be at least 300 billion universes' worth of things
that we don't know
yet what we do know is that we're here
thinking, feeling
right here, right now
pulsing with the bio-electrical charges of a trillion synapses
in a universe in which we don't have to make things up
because it's already big enough
The present is our primum mobile
It moves us out, each moment, into the world
and at the same time into our selves
pivots us from the microcosm of self
to the macrocosm of our understandings
a million million million journeys
these neurons take us on
like a rocket ship
O voi che siete in piccioletta barca... *
A statistician
pondering the improbability of his own existence
steps into the chapel
or out into the night sky
and yet holds onto his tablet
doesn't let it drop and fall to his knees
but falls to his knees clenching the calculations
that made his devotion possible
He sees on the glass screen of his tablet
(once cuneiform in clay
now digits that create letters;
the outward and the inner forms of silicon)
and feels the beauty of it all
but without the need to believe
in things he can't fathom
without the need to deny
the building blocks of the body
the miracle of existence
that is a miraculous here
this miracle of feeling
intertwined with the miracle of thinking
which whispers to us that the miracle may also be there
beyond us
outside this café
or in the streets of Vicenza
or in some other universe
the same church bell tolling optimistically
in the night sky
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* "Easter Wings" is a poem by George Herbert, published in 1633. Here is the first stanza:
Lord, who created man in wealth and store,
Though foolishly he lost the same,
Decaying more and more,
Till he became
Most poor:
With thee
O let me rise
As larks, harmoniously,
And sing this day thy victories:
Then shall the fall further the flight in me.
* O voi che siete in piccioletta barca... O, you who are in your little boat... (Dante, Paradiso 2.1)
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